Links:Acrobat (scanned from
the original 1986 publication). A companion paper by Butler Lampson on the Alto
software is here. The 1972 memo describing the Alto
project is here. Slides for a talk
on the development of the Alto and its historical context are here.

Between 1972 and 1980, the first distributed personal computing system was
built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The system was composed of a
number of Alto workstations connected by an Ethernet local network. It also
included servers that provided centralized facilities. This paper describes the
development of the hardware that was the basis of the system.